Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 195[1] for the week ending September
27, 2009. What follows are some highlights from this issue.

Kicking off this week's issue in announcements, a new IRC channel for
Fedora Activity Days, launched in time for the next upcoming FAD in
Germany, and updates on feature freeze for Fedora 12 beta this week,
along with other related updates. From the Fedora Planet, postings and
views from Fedora contributors worldwide, and a collection of FAD EMEA
related links. In marketing news, Fedora 12 talking points, Fedora
Insight status and other current activities. In ambassadors, details of
the upcoming Utah Open Source Conference, and activities Ambassadors can
do for Fedora 12. The Quality Assurance beat this week brings up
up-to-date on weekly meeting and Test Day activities, as well as Fedora
12 beta related work. This issue rounds out with news from the
Art/Design team, providing detail on the mosaic polish for the Fedora 12
theme. That rounds out this week's issue of Fedora Weekly News, which we
hope you enjoy!

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Weekly News, please see
our 'join' page[2]. We welcome reader feedback: fedora-news-list redhat com

The Fedora News team is collaborating with Marketing and Docs to come up
with a new exciting platform for disseminating news and views on Fedora,
called Fedora Insight. If you are interested, please join the list and
let us know how you would like to assist with this effort.

Gerold Kassube announced[1] the new IRC-Channel #fedora-fad which is
opened right now for everybody to attend a FAD (== Fedora Activity Day)
online. Gerold mentioned, “I created that channel, because of some
people asked (also in the past) about who cann't attend a FAD. The next
FAD in EMEA takes place (again and by tradition) in Rheinfelden, Germany
on the next weekend [2]. ”

John Poelstra had explicitly announced[1] that All Features Need to be
100% by Beta Freeze by Tuesday, September 29th, 2009.

Beta Freeze [2] means that all features and their associated feature
pages must be at 100% completion by this date. The following features
are currently not 100% complete and need to be by Tuesday, September 29,
2009. In many cases it appears they are just 1% away.

“Fedora 12 Snapshot 3 is now available for testing. These snapshots
consist of live images only. These were composed yesterday, and made
available today.” announced Jesse Keating[1][2][3] Jessy requested to
report issues in bugzilla.

Jesse Keating announced[1], “Per the Fedora 12 Schedule[2] , mass
branching for Fedora 12 will happen on the 28th of September, which is
this coming Monday. There will be a short CVS outage associated with
this event. The exact timing of this outage has not been decided yet,
but we will send the outage notification when it has been decided.”

This past week, Richard W.M. Jones posted a number of tidbits on
interesting ways of manipulating virtual machines using Fedora. First,
there is virt-rescue[1], which "lets you get a rescue shell on your
virtual machine" but running on the host machine. The virt-edit[2] tool
allows you to edit files from the host environment. Lastly,
virt-ifconfig[3] can list the IP addresses of network interfaces on
virtual machine guests.

After Mark Shuttleworth's recent keynote at LinuxCon, Chris Ball
questioned[4] a potentially sexist remark that Shuttleworth made. Adam
Williamson used[5] the opportunity to "consider the wider issues around
the topic."

Marc Ferguson announced[6] that a new site, FOSS Threads has been
launched, where you can buy "designer geekwear. Our shirts are designed
to fashionably get attention, start conversations and share your love
for free and open source software."

Speaking of eye-candy, the SMonohand[7] font has a "chalkboard-y" look
to it, and Máirín Duffy is looking[8] for someone interested in
packaging it for Fedora.

Ingvar Hagelund wrote[9] a short shell script that can automatically
monitor the service contract expiration of Dell systems.

Kulbir Saini found[10] an interesting plugin for Pidgin for use when
people ask questions that could easily be solved with a simple Google
search.

The Fedora Ambassador Day EMEA 2009 took place this past weekend in
Rheinfelden, Germany. There were lots of interesting posts from Max
Spevack[1],[2],[3],[4], Joerg Simon[5],[6], Yaakov Nemoy[7] and Pierros
Papadeas[8].

Talking points are more or less done[4] and now ambassadors can start
using them. Ambassadors can choose from various suggestions on using
talking points[5].

--- Matchmaking for Feature Profile interviews ---

With the F12 talking points out already, we need to start doing print or
podcast interviews around some of the points /features[6]. We identified
the desktop,admin and development users category and selected 4 talking
points that should definitely have interviews to go along with them-
Next-Gen Ogg, NetworkManager enhancements, Virt improvements, and
Systemtap improvements.

The tools / information to start doing interviews are available[7]. If
someone is willing to take something on, please add your name to the
wiki as the owner so we know that we (a) have an owner, and (b) don't
have 12 owners being redundant.

Paul W. Frields has graciously volunteered to do the SystemTap interview
and has shared a stub page for the systmetap interview he did in F11[8].
A podcast will be available soon. Thanks Paul!!!

We originally planned to launch Fedora Insight on September 29 (right
before infrastructure freeze), but to get a stable platform up and
tested, with a contribution workflow we're all happy with, we pushed the
launch date out until right after the freeze instead and moved it to Oct
14(when the freeze lifts), and the revised schedule is available[10].
[11][12].

--- Marketing Research ---

Robyn is working on a list of questions on marketing research to be sent
out and will keep plugging away at market research.

--- Coming up next ---

In-depth feature profiles are on track and should get finished by
2009-10-06. Help with podcasts is available on a wiki page "How to make
a podcast" and provides advises on how to start with making podcasts for
best results[13].

Red Hat Marketing/PR will be helping a during the F12 release cycle and
we should have a release video ready for release day. Paul will be
recording the video and is currently working to get a couple feature
videos ready in the coming weeks.

If you live in the Mountain West region of the U.S. -- and even if you
don't -- don't miss the region's biggest and best Linux festival.
Registration is still open for Utah Open Source Conference 2009, to be
held in Salt Lake City, Utah, from Oct. 8-10. This is the third year of
this annual event, and Fedora is one of the sponsors.

Fedora will have a booth at the event and those in the area are urged to
attend the event and are welcome to help out. For more information on
staffing the booth, contact Larry Cafiero at
lcafiero-at-fedoraproject-dot-org.

--- Get on the map ---
Want to find the nearest ambassador? How about one in Belarus? Now you can.

Susmit Shannigrahi reports that finding out the nearest ambassadors,
which was once a tedious task, is now as simple as viewing a map. The
map is at here and instructions on how to place yourself on the map can
be found at here.

--- Fedora 12 is coming ---

While you may still be promoting Fedora 11 in your areas, you can make
plans for Fedora 12 events to promote and celebrate the release of our
next version.

As such, with the upcoming release of Fedora 12, this is a reminder that
posting an announcement of your event on Fedora Weekly News can help get
the word out. Contact FWN Ambassador correspondent Larry Cafiero at
lcafiero-AT-fedoraproject-DOT-org with announcements of upcoming events
-- and don't forget to e-mail reports after the events as well.

Last week's Test Day[1] was on Xfce[2], the popular alternative desktop.
including PulseAudio[3]. The always-loyal Xfce enthusiast base turned
out to check on the polish of the Xfce desktop for Fedora 12, and filed
many useful bug reports. Thanks to everyone who came out.

Next week's Test Day[4] on 2009-10-01 will be on the installer's
(Anaconda) storage system. As always, the Test Day will run all day in
the #fedora-test-day IRC channel. The complete rewrite of Anaconda's
storage code which first appeared in Fedora 11 continues to be refined,
so please come out to the Test Day and help us ensure Anaconda is tested
on a wide range of storage hardware and configurations.

No Fit and Finish track Test Day is planned for next week.

If you would like to propose a main track Test Day for the Fedora 12
cycle, please contact the QA team via email or IRC, or file a ticket in
QA Trac[5].

The QA group weekly meeting[1] was held on 2009-09-21. The full log is
available[2]. Adam Williamson noted that the zsync issues raised at the
previous meeting had been discussed in a development mailing list
thread[3], but no real movement had yet occurred.

Adam Williamson mentioned that the beta release process was getting
underway, and the test compose would be happening on 2009-09-23. He also
reminded the group that a blocker bug review meeting would be taking
place on 2009-09-25. He asked the group to test the test compose,
Rawhide itself, and the nightly Rawhide live CDs as much as possible,
and particularly to try and test beta blockers bugs that required
re-testing.

David Pravec said he had been talking to the Anaconda team and they were
unhappy about significant changes being made to components on which
Anaconda depends so close to the beta release time. The specific example
raised was the major changes made to the nss package in the days before
the meeting. The group discussed the problem, and agreed that there
needed to be better communication between the Anaconda team and
developers responsible for the components on which it relies. Jesse
Keating pointed out that such changes sometimes result from the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux development process, with Red Hat staff being requested
to make changes in Fedora for the ultimate benefit of that product. The
group unanimously felt that there should be a process for such changes
which ensures that they do not negatively affect the Fedora development
process, and that Red Hat Enterprise Linux engineers should be required
to be considerate of Fedora deadlines and processes when making changes
to Fedora. Jesse said he should be able to raise this issue with the
appropriate Red Hat management staff.

Seth Vidal asked the group whether it would be acceptable to submit a
new version of yum which includes history support to Rawhide prior to
the release of Fedora 12 Beta. After some discussion, the group agreed
that it would be an acceptable risk to make this change, as Seth had
already performed some good testing on it and had a good plan for
backing out the change if it became necessary.

The Bugzappers group weekly meeting[4] was held on 2009-09-22. The full
log is available[5]. Edward Kirk noted there had been no real movement
on the triage day improvement topic, but he was hoping to pull something
together soon.

Edward Kirk was also looking for a way to improve the tracking of action
items from previous meetings, some of which he felt had fallen through
the cracks in the past. After some discussion, John5342 suggested using
the team's trac instance[6] for this purpose, and the group agreed this
was a good idea. Edward Kirk volunteered to transfer any outstanding
action items from previous meetings to Trac.

No-one had heard from Brennan Ashton regarding the triage metrics
project in the week before the meeting.

Richard June gave an update on the kernel triage project. He was still
finding that the wireless tickets he was checking were all well-filed
and would not much benefit from triage. He was therefore moving to look
at a wider range of kernel bugs to see if this impression held true. He
was also planning to get in touch with kernel developers to get some
instruction on what kinds of information they would require on
particular bugs.

The next QA weekly meeting will be held on 2009-09-28 at 1600 UTC in
#fedora-meeting, and the next Bugzappers weekly meeting on 2009-09-29 at
1500 UTC in #fedora-meeting.

Liam Li announced[1] the Fedora 12 Beta test compose, a test build to
check for major showstopper bugs that would appear only in the
traditional installer physical media builds. Earlier, he had sent a mail
detailing the types of testing[2] that would be useful, and the results
matrix page[3] for reporting results. Several people reported failures
with the test compose images, and Liam later announced an updated test
compose[4] which fixed the most significant bug affecting the earlier
compose.

Sergey Rudchenko asked[1] whether triagers could ever close a bug as
NEXTRELEASE without reference to the maintainer responsible for the bug.
Adam Williamson explained[2] that this was rarely the case, as it would
require certain knowledge of the maintainers intentions regarding which
releases they intended to fix the bug in.Karel Volny asked[3] why some
of what Adam had said did not seem to match the policy documented on the
Bugzilla page[4]. Adam explained[5] that the canonical reference for
Fedora's bug process is in fact on the Wiki[6], and explained some
wrinkles around distribution versioning, which he promised to explain on
the Wiki page.

Máirín Duffy proposed[1] a new 3D way to produce a polished version of
the mosaic that will be used for the Fedora 12 theme "I came up with
this today, polishing on the original mosaic [[User:tatica|María] did
with the blur/focus technique we had discussed trying a while back"
inquiring if it is a path worth using. It was positively appreciated,
with only a reserve from[2] Martin Sourada about the amount of bokeh[3]
used: "It looks really great, although while excellent for anaconda
banner, I think the amount of lens flare in the wallpaper is a little
too much."